THIS IS WRONG! The Apply button has been hit 3 times and the OK button as well! Delete the last 3 Extrudes! Just click on “Top” on the dice in the top right corner. Make sure after you have done this that view is directly from the top NOT like the in the screen capture below. In order to see what we are doing we need to go in View-Draw-style and select wireframe (you can do this by the icon short-cut too).

We could save this, export it as an STL file then use slic3r to get a g-code file and print it. With that example just stop before you start adding the two holes and come back here. If you need to know how to do this then it is exactly the same as I did in this (even simpler) example HERE. I’m going to skip over making the 3D slab. Where I know what a tweak should be I’ll point it out. I’m running Ubuntu 18.043LTS but this should flow right for Windows/Mac or any other Linux flavour with minor tweaks only. One of the items that had me guessing for some time was how to incorporate 3D text into a design.Īs a firm believer in the principle of KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) I started out by making this really simple childs nameplate stencil. But it is a complex tool and sometimes finding the route in to a solution can be difficult. Freecad is a great tool for developing 3 dimensional drawings for 3D printing.

3d printing with freecad